FEINBERG FORECAST: Oscars Landscape in the Home Stretch

The post-noms, pre-voting period is always strange, but this year's takes the cake, from four Oscar nominees taking over the Grammys to two others being disqualified. THR's awards analyst Scott Feinberg tries to make sense of it all.

Every week until the 86th Oscars on March 2, 2014, The Hollywood Reporter's lead awards analyst, Scott Feinberg, will post an updated "Feinberg Forecast," wherein he presents a summary of major developments since the last update that helped to shape his current opinions, and then lists his revised projections. For more about Feinberg and how he arrives at his projections, as well as an acronyms key, scroll to the bottom of this post.

The 29th Santa Barbara International Film Festival will kick off on Jan. 30 and run through Feb. 10. As always, many of this year's Oscar nominees will grant extensive Q&As as part of fest tributes and/or appear on special panels to discuss their work and the state of the industry -- and THR will be on the scene from start to finish.

The Writers Guild of America's 66thWGA Awards will take place in New York and Los Angeles simultaneously on Feb. 1. (Here is my full analysis of their nominations.)

The International Animated Film Association's 41st Annie Awards will take place in Los Angeles on Feb. 1.

The American Society of Cinematographers' 28thASC Awards will take place in Los Angeles on Feb. 1.

Scott has been forecasting the Oscars since 2001 and has one of the strongest track records of all awards pundits at doing so. His best showings came in 2006 and 2013, when he correctly called 21 out of 24 winners. He was the only pundit to project best picture nominations for The Reader (2008), The Blind Side (2009) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) and acting noms for Silver Linings Playbook's Jacki Weaver (2012) and The Wolf of Wall Street's Jonah Hill (2013), among other long shots.

He factors into his projections personal impressions (based on advance screenings of hundreds of films each year), publicly available information (release dates, genres, talent rosters and teasers/trailers often offer valuable clues), historical considerations (comparing and contrasting how other films with similar pedigrees have resonated), precursor awards (some awards groups have historically correlated with the Academy more than others), and conversations with industry insiders (including fellow members of the press, awards strategists, filmmakers and awards voters).

Key

Contenders' names are followed, when appropriate, by acronyms of the major awards groups (see below) that have already named them winners (in orange) or nominees (in purple). Some nominations are still pending (they appear in italics).